Chelsea Manning’s Wicked Beats

The WikiLeaks source preps for her first public d.j. set in fifteen years, at a club in Brooklyn, where she chats about electronic dance music (“how I survived prison”) and being more than just her Wikipedia page.

By Nathan Heller

Chelsea Manning—the military leaker turned trans icon turned onetime Senate candidate—hadn’t publicly been behind a d.j. booth in fifteen years when, the other day, she decided to give her former hobby a fresh spin. She booked an appearance at a Brooklyn club, for a Friday night, and prepared by practicing her cueing. She combed through her library and assembled a new set. With a long, strange summer mostly gone, she reasoned, people needed music of remission and release. Or, as she put it when her night started, “The theme of this set is very much ‘The world is burning down, so let’s party while we can.’ ”

She was sitting in a greenroom in the club Elsewhere, a small haven of youth and coolness within the larger haven of Bushwick. Feeling playful before the mirror, she began to try on headwear for the night: a twinkling pair of kitten ears; round, rose-colored glasses of librarian severity. In 2013, Manning was found guilty of multiple criminal charges relating to her release of hundreds of thousands of classified or sensitive files to WikiLeaks while working in Army intelligence. The day after her sentencing, she came out as trans, and on her release from prison, in 2017, following a sentence commutation by President Obama, she reëntered civilian life as a part-time activist and a full-time lightning rod. A primary run for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Maryland followed; so did, by her account, “a lot of therapy.” In 2019, after defying a subpoena from a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, Manning was jailed for contempt of court, and by the time she was freed, in March, 2020, the world was locking down. “In this post-Trump, post-covid era, I’m needing a break,” she said. “And I want to make sure I capitalize on my dreams before I reach middle age.”

Musically speaking, Manning, who is thirty-four, is a drum-and-bass and trance person, though she also claims affinities for electropop, early dubstep, and house. “Electronic music is how I survived prison,” she said. The interest, though, predated her incarceration. In her teens, while living in southwest Wales, she helped manage several sort-of-almost-famous punk bands, and went on to d.j. in Greater Washington, D.C. (an area, she notes, that was “not known for its electronic dance music”). The turntables spun down as her work spun up, but even when life spun out of control—most recently, the pandemic killed the speaking gigs from which she made a living—music always helped.

“I know that I’m not going to be a huge d.j.,” Manning said, nervously unzipping a large gray backpack (“This is travelling light for me”) and extracting a MacBook that she always totes around. “But the only way you’re going to get good at doing live shows is to do live shows—I’m trying baby steps.”

Among her terrors? “Hitting the wrong button.” Fair enough. In the black-painted club space, Manning looked small and mouselike before the three-screen panel. “I hope I don’t suck,” she’d worried before giving the hardware a practice whirl.

Back in the day, Manning used to work with a turntable, a mixer, and a laptop. Now everything is digital, and by club-kid standards she’s an Old. “House music came from within the queer and trans community, and there’s quite a bit in this set, because I think younger people need to be reminded,” she said, embracing a prim seniority. Her memoir, out this fall, is called “readme.txt”—a title that, if it doesn’t quite scream sex and drama, also can’t be accused of revealing too much. An early draft, she said, was redacted by instruction of the U.S. government, and the final looks beyond state secrets, toward secrets of the soul. “I’m a lot more than the first three sentences of my Wikipedia page,” Manning said. “My friends know that, my Twitter followers know that, and the people tonight know that—I hope.”

The club’s doors opened at ten. One dancer sported elf ears and trousers with huge thorns protruding. There were the usual angel wings and devil horns, as well as, less traditionally, fishing caps and eyeglasses with spiky frames. Half an hour past midnight, Manning appeared, to applause, and dropped the bass. She wore her kitten ears and glasses with an all-black outfit: leather pants, a tulle blouse, a silk vest, and a Diane Keaton tie with small red stripes. She played a broody remix of “Toxic,” by Britney Spears, and a driving version of “Hot in It,” by Charli XCX and Tiësto. The dancers had their hands in the air and their phones in the air, and the lights changed color—purple, blue, green, red.

A clubber named Niko Vaude, dressed in a mesh shirt and a police cap that read “I’m a Mess,” danced his heart out. Vaude is a music producer in his mid-twenties, but has spent much of adulthood locked up for the pandemic. “Everything I admire is people being unapologetically themselves, and Chelsea is,” he said. “This is amazing, but”—he grinned in sudden shyness—“I’ll also be happy to get home, have a shower, and get back to reading Jane Austen.” ?